… you send an email to registered customers.

Last week, we sent emails to everybody on our mailing list announcing the availability of our latest and greatest and we were very unhappy to see the number that were immediately bounced back!

So, we work hard implementing features requested by customers and we can’t even tell some of them what is now available to them! The reasons provided by our customers’ ISPs varied greatly (remember the following list relates only to addresses that were registered with us, and needed for obtaining downloads, etc). The 36 reasons were variations on the following themes:

  • Account does not exist
  • country ip access denied
  • Host or domain name not found
  • Invalid recipient
  • Mail appears to be unsolicited
  • message looks like SPAM to me
  • Message rejected due to content restrictions
  • no mailbox here by that name
  • not listed in Domino Directory
  • not listed in public Name & Address Book
  • recipient rejected
  • relaying denied from your location
  • that domain isn’t in my list of allowed rcpthosts
  • The recipient cannot be verified
  • This address does not receive mail
  • This mail server requires authentication when attempting to send to a non-local e-mail address
  • this recipient is not in my validrcptto list
  • your mailserver is rejected by local block list

Those all look like permanent problems, but there were also those that may or may not be temporary:

  • Can’t create output
  • Mailbox disabled for this recipient
  • Mailbox has exceeded the limit
  • mailbox is full: retry timeout exceeded
  • Mailbox unavailable or access denied
  • mailbox unavailable or not local
  • The user has not enough diskspace available
  • unrouteable address

As I said, these all relate to addresses provided by customers to communicate with us. The most usual reason for the problems above is that the customer has changed their email address without telling us. Also, they may not even be aware that our mail is being blocked.

This leaves us in a catch-22 situation: how do we inform people that we can’t reach them? Publicizing names is not an option, as we value the privacy of our customers. The only thing I can do right now is to blog and post on newsgroups to ask customers whether they received our email about our ‘Vinci’ releases.

If you are one of our customers and would have expected to receive this email, please write to support with sufficient details for us to identify you from an address which we can reply to, and we will get your account brought up to date.

Conversely, if you received an email (because you expressed interest in our products at some stage) and no longer wish to receive them, please reply to the email asking to be removed from the mailing list. We are not spammers and certainly do not want to waste our and your time with unwanted emails.